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Frenchman’s Creek
by
The creek was just the same lonesome place that it is to-day, the only difference being that the pallace at the entrance had a roof on it then, and was rented by Sam Trewhella–the same that followed old Hockaday’s coffin, as I’ve told you. But above the pallace the woods grew close to the water’s edge, and lined both shores with never a clearing till you reached the end, where the cottage stands now and the stream comes down beside it: in those days there wasn’t any cottage, only a piece of swampy ground. I don’t know that Bligh saw much in the scenery, but it may have helped to soothe his mind: for by and by he settled himself on the bottom-boards, lit another pipe, pulled his hat over his nose, and lay there blinking at the sky, while the boat drifted up, hitching sometimes in a bough and sometimes floating broadside-on to the current, until she reached this bit of marsh and took the mud very gently.
After a while, finding she didn’t move, Bligh lifted his head for a look about him and found that he’d come to the end of the creek. He put out a hand and felt the water, that was almost luke-warm with running over the mud. The trees shut him in; not a living soul was in sight; and by the quietness he might have been a hundred miles from anywhere. So what does my gentleman do but strip himself for a comfortable bathe.
He folded his clothes very neatly in the stern-sheets, waded out across the shallows as naked as a babe, and took to the water with so much delight that after a minute or so he must needs lie on his back and kick. He splashed away, one leg after the other, with his face turned towards the shore, and was just on the point of rolling over for another swim, when, as he lifted a leg for one last kick, his eyes fell on the boat. And there on the top of his clothes, in the stern of her, sat my grandfather sucking a pipe.
Bligh let down his legs and stood up, touching bottom, but neck-deep in water.
“Hi, you there!” he sings out.
“Wee, wee, parleyvou!” my grandfather answers, making use of pretty well all the French he knew.
“Confound you, Sir, for an impident dirty dog! What in the name of jiminy”–I can’t give you, Sir, the exact words, for my grandfather could never be got to repeat ’em–“What in the name of jiminy d’ee mean by sitting on my clothes!”
“Wee, wee,” my grandfather took him up, calm as you please. “You shocked me dreadful yesterday with your blasphemious talk: but now, seeing ’tis French, I don’t mind so much. Take your time: but when you come out you go to prison. Wee, wee–preeson,” says my grandfather.
“Are you drunk?” yells Bligh. “Get off my clothes this instant, you hobnailed son of a something-or-other!” And he began striding for shore.
“In the name of His Majesty King George the Third I charge you to come along quiet,” says my grandfather, picking up a stretcher.
Bligh, being naked and unarmed, casts a look round for some way to help himself. He was a plucky fellow enough in a fight, as I’ve said: but I leave you to guess what he felt like when to right and left of him the bushes parted, and forth stepped half a dozen men in black suits with black silk weepers a foot and a half wide tied in great bunches round their hats. These were Sam Trewhella, of course, and the rest of the funeral-party, that had left the coffin in a nice shady spot inside the Vicarage garden gate, and come along to assist the law. They had brought along pretty nearly all the menkind of the parish beside: but these, being in their work-a-day clothes, didn’t appear, and for a reason you’ll learn by and by. All that Bligh saw was this dismal company of mourners backed by a rabble of school-children, the little ones lining the shore and staring at him fearsomely with their fingers in their mouths.